John MacLeod Fraser, 1935 to 2010

In an eventful diplomatic career spanning 36 years, John MacLeod Fraser had an inside view of some of the late 20th century’s momentous events.

As charge d’affaires, Fraser opened Canada’s embassy in 1971 in what was then called Peking after the Trudeau government established diplomatic relations with Communist China.

He was a counsellor at the embassy in Washington during Watergate, monitoring American foreign policy, as he liked to put it, “from Rabat to Tokyo.”

And as Canada’s ambassador to Poland between 1980 and 1983, he witnessed the rise of the Solidarity movement and the imposition of martial law in 1981.

By the time he retired in 1994, he’d won the unanimous respect of his colleagues at External Affairs. “He was a much-admired guy, deemed to imbue the essential virtues of the right kind of foreign service officer,” said Robert Fowler, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations.

Fraser, who died Dec. 29 at age 75, was “arguably the finest diplomatic writer of his generation,” according to Jim Mitchell, a former assistant secretary to the cabinet and Treasury Board.

His cables from Warsaw during the Solidarity uprising “were a masterpiece and deserve to be published as the finest, most insightful chronicle of that period,” said Mitchell, now a partner in the Sussex Circle consulting group.

But as a young man, Fraser assumed he would become a newspaper reporter, not a diplomat. His father, Blair Fraser, was one of the country’s most prominent journalists until his untimely death in 1968 in a canoeing accident on the Petawawa River.

Even after he studied politics, philosophy and economics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, journalism remained an option for Fraser. He landed summer work at The Observer in London, and was offered a full-time job. Instead, he returned to Canada and joined External Affairs in 1958.

“At that stage, my father was at the peak of his career,” explained his brother, Graham Fraser, a former journalist himself who is now Canada’s commissioner of official languages. “He felt he should do something else, where he wouldn’t be working in the shadow of his father’s career.”

John Fraser was born in Montreal on Feb. 12, 1935, when his illustrious father was still working nights at the Montreal Gazette.

One of his earliest memories was the start of the Second World War. “That was when daddy was up for breakfast, because he stayed all night to put out the special edition on the beginning of the war,” said his brother.

After Blair Fraser became Ottawa editor of Maclean’s in 1943, the family moved to Ottawa. Young John attended Devonshire Public School and Ashbury College before returning to Montreal to enrol at McGill.

Though he excelled academically, he worried that his lack of athletic prowess might disqualify him from consideration for the Rhodes Scholarship.

“My athletic accomplishments were close to non-existent,” he wrote in a 1997 entry in Mc-Gill’s alumni newsletter. “Many Rhodes Scholarship selection committees would no doubt have ruled me out for that reason. Fortunately, the Quebec committee took a flexible view of the athletic dimension.”

In the McGill newsletter, Fraser wrote that all he could remember of his Rhodes interview was that he was “terrified of oversleeping and missing it. I asked various friends to telephone that morning. I woke early, of course, and spent the following half-hour answering the phone.”

The scholarship was a formative experience. “He was an intensely civilized person, and Oxford was nothing if not a civilized experience,” said Graham Fraser.” He also made lifelong friends at Oxford, and read “widely and deeply” throughout his adult life.

After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1968, Fraser married Deborah Hartley in 1974, inheriting four stepchildren in the process.

Both he and Deborah were notable animal lovers. “To get to him, you always had to walk through cats and dogs,” recalled Ian Clark, a fellow diplomat and longtime friend.

Fraser was famously fond of cats, and would invariably bring his pets when he took up a foreign posting.

“There were some cats who were notorious for being unfriendly to visitors,” said his brother Graham. “But John was immensely tolerant of cats who, in my view, were not quite as deserving of his good nature.”

Family and friends say Fraser was an accomplished storyteller with a wry sense of humour. He was also intellectually nuanced. “He was not somebody who thought in black and white,” his brother said.

His first foreign post was Belgrade, where he was third secretary. He learned enough of the language that, when appointed ambassador to the former Yugoslavia in 1983, he was able to present his credentials in Serbo-Croat.

He was next posted to Hong Kong as a political observer, charged with keeping tabs on what was going on in China. From 1968 to 1970, he was part of the team that negotiated Canada’s recognition of China.

Back in Ottawa in the latter 1970s, he was director of External’s Middle East Division when the Joe Clark government proposed, then abandoned, the incendiary idea of moving Canada’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

After stints as ambassador to Poland and Yugoslavia, Fraser returned to Ottawa as director-general of External’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau. He spent two years teaching at Carleton University before retiring in 1994.

It was retirement in name only, however. Until 2009, he worked on contract as an intelligence analyst, providing insight into events in the Balkans for the Canadian government.

Fraser suffered from emphysema. A hip replacement that wasn’t very successful also limited his mobility in later years.

Still, he appeared to be doing well when he gathered with friends and family over the Christmas season. But on the morning of Dec. 29, he was feeling unwell and didn’t get out of bed. He died of cardiac arrest, with his wife Deborah at his side.

“It was, I think, the death he would have wanted,” said Graham Fraser.

“It was at home. It was quiet and gentle, and beside the woman he loved.”